


you wish I was a fairy tale

by butforthegrace



Category: Fables - Willingham, Runaways
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Victor won’t lie, he’s grateful: in the dark, she almost looks like Lillie.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	you wish I was a fairy tale

Victor meets the red-haired girl in a bar, and he doesn’t learn her name until they’re stumbling to her apartment, arms around each other, trying not to fall.

“Rose,” she says, without looking at him.  “Rose Red.”

“’Cause of your hair?”

“The name came first,” she snaps, though it’s kind of hard to be seriously offended when she’s slurring her words and she nearly falls to the sidewalk after she says that.

Victor’s strong enough to keep her upright, though, and he can’t help but think of another time when he was this close to a redheaded girl, though her hair was longer and her name was different.

  
   
They don’t sleep together that night.  Rose kisses him hard and then she falls asleep in her bed, and Victor curls up at the foot of it and tries to pretend like he’s sleeping too.  
 

  
The advantage of being made of things other than normal human parts is that he doesn’t get hangovers, and he doesn’t really envy Rose, who hasn’t gotten out of bed since she woke up.

He makes her coffee, and she tells him to get out.  
 

  
That would be that, but then they run into each other in a Midtown Starbucks, and Victor’s all for pretending he has no idea who she is but she comes up to him, taps him on the shoulder, asks him to sit with her.

“Sorry about the other night,” she says when they’re sitting down, at a table in the corner.

He shakes his head.  “I don’t know why you’re apologizing.  You’re not the only one who was drunk out of their mind.”

She snorts and takes a sip of her coffee.  “The coffee you made was terrible.”

“Hey, I work with what I’ve got.”

“Do you,” she says, and from the look in her eyes he thinks that she might not be talking about coffee anymore.  
 

  
There’s sunlight shining into her apartment, but she pulls down the blinds so that they’re in the dark.  Victor won’t lie, he’s grateful: in the dark, she almost looks like Lillie.

Rose doesn’t kiss him this time.  They get straight to it.

When it’s over, she kicks him out again, but not without getting his phone number this time.  
 

  
Nico calls him that night, as he’s lying alone in a motel room in Queens.

“When are you coming back to LA, Victor?” she asks him, without even saying hello.  He stares at a dark spot on the carpet for a few seconds before he answers.

“I don’t know.  I like New York.”

“Still looking for L—that girl in the streets?”

Nico’s voice is bitter, and Victor regrets Lillie for the thousandth time.  He wouldn’t have done  _anything_  if he’d known how much Nico would hate him, even as she was pleading with him to come back.  How much everyone would hate him.

“I don’t hate you,” she says, as if she can read his mind.  (Maybe she can.  She  _is_  a witch.)  “I’m still mad, but I don’t hate you.  No one does.  We all miss you.”

Maybe she’s lying.  He can’t tell.  He’s no witch, just a cyborg, and maybe that could be an excuse if he really wanted it to be, but he knows that it’s not.

“Come home,” Nico tells him, and then she hangs up, and Victor is alone again.  
 

  
“I fucked everything up.”

He’s sitting on Rose’s couch, drinking shitty coffee; she’s walking around in a tank top and underwear, rearranging some CDs.

“So did I, kid.  You learn to live with it.”

“I have a name.”

She turns and looks at him intently.  “You called me Lillie the other night.  When we were drunk.  Your name matters about as much as mine does.”

His face grows hot, and he looks down at the mug in his hands.  “Fine.  Whatever.”

She drops onto the couch beside him, tucking her legs underneath her, and puts one hand over his.  “It’ll be okay eventually.  Whatever you did.  And even if it doesn’t—you keep living, you know? The bitterness and the regret and the anger—just let it all be.  Sometimes it’s useful.”

“How do you know?” he asks, and maybe he sounds too skeptical, because her face hardens a little, and then she laughs.

“Hundreds of years of experience, kid.”

“Yeah.  Sure.”

She raises her eyebrows at him, and he feels like an idiot for saying anything; this conversation is too raw to be had with a near-stranger.  But that’s always been his problem, right? Girls want things of him, and he gives these things to them, and he doesn’t know where to go from there.  His mother, Nico, Lillie—he fucks everything up in the end.

But he can’t tell Rose that.  
 

  
He decides it’s easier to run away from his problems than to face them.

He doesn’t go back to LA.  Not for a long, long time.


End file.
